[MUSIC] So we've just seen that other people can lead us to do some bad stuff, right? We're naturally copying other people's behaviors, naturally copying their emotions, and even copying in some cases their immoral actions. But the good news is that since we're so susceptible to other people as a situation, we can also harness them to achieve our happiness goals. But the question is, how do we do that? How can we use the social conformity for good instead of bad? Thankfully, we have our PSYCHROTIPS. And the first PSYCHROTIP is that we can harness other people to be good social benchmarks and to show us some social proof, what do I mean by these things? We'll first defined social benchmarks as the psychological phenomenon in which other people's behavior gives you a standard by which to assess your own behavior. Before we talk about social comparison and reference points, normally those are bad, but sometimes you can use social benchmarks for good. If you pick the right reference point, then copying that person's behavior might be really helpful. And there's lots of evidence that using these social benchmarks can be quite powerful. One of my favorite examples comes from the Princeton psychologist, Betsy Paluck, she actually did her degree back at Yale here. And she was really interested in how we can change around a different kind of behavior. Maybe not that's one that's relevant as much for personal happiness, but one that she was really interested in, bullying. She wanted to figure out whether she could use the right social benchmarks to stop bullying. And she was really interested in studying high school and middle school social networks, right? Who's the node in this big social network that if they were the right reference point, could get other kids to stop bullying? And so she did this deep lovely dive on who were the individuals who would be most helpful for kind of nipping bullying in the bud in these middle schools. And so what she found was that she studied this different school social network, she went to each school, studied the social network and she figured out the kids in the middle of the social network with the right nodes, they weren't necessarily the people with the most friends, but they were the ones with the most connections. They were the students who are going to be seeing the most. And she worked with those kids and convinced them, hey, bullying kind of sucks. Would you be willing to take a public stand against bullying? Maybe come up with your own creative design or wear some bracelet or something, but basically be very public about the fact that you don't like bullying. So students agreed to do this. And what she found was that across the whole school year, this intervention reduced bullying in these individual schools by 30%, right? Just having the right benchmark be, hey, I don't think this behavior is cool, can make the people around you naturally follow it, which is pretty cool. That social benchmarking. But there's also the power of social proof that we can use to change our behavior. It's kind of like social benchmarking, but social proof is a phenomenon in which you assume the actions that other people are doing reflect what you're supposed to do. So it's not just a reference point about, the normal student in my school is doing this. It's this is proof that this is the thing I'm supposed to be doing in any situation, right? That kind of correct behavior. And there's lots of evidence that social proof is really powerful even when it's quite automatic. We're using these kinds of things more automatically than we realize. One of my favorite examples of this was from a study by the Nudge Group. So there's a lot of governmental groups that are trying to nudge people's behavior positively and this one group was really worried about littering. And so they did a subtle nudge where they tried to see whether these social proof signals could reduce littering. And so what they did was they did some survey where they gave out caramel candies with a rapper. So a bunch of people got these candies but of course, they have this rapper, and that people might be tempted to just like flying on the ground, could it really subtle social signal, change people's behavior? And so what they did to add this subtle social signal was that they painted footprints on the ground as though some person was there towards the garbage can. So no one told people to do this, there wasn't even an actual agent, but there was this subtle social proof. You're supposed to take stuff to the garbage can. And what did they find? They saw a 46% reduction in the number of rappers that were thrown on the street, right? Just like the subtle social signal gets people to behave correctly. That's littering. But you can see the power of social proof and things that really matter like voting. If we're going to fix the problem in the United States today, we need to make sure that your vote, you and especially young people are all voting for the causes that they care about. But there's a problem and that young people don't often vote as much. So what can we do to deal with this? Maybe we can use the power of social proof and that's just what BOND et al did, they teamed up with researchers on Facebook and they got an intervention that targeted 61 million people back in the 2010 election. And people either saw an information condition that was, hey, there's a pop up in your Facebook feed, hey, voting, today's election day, make sure you vote. Or one that was social, they had to pop up that said, hey, today's election day, but it was pictures of your friends who also voted. So these are the images that actually look like this is the information one. Hey, voting is happening. Here is the social one, it's, hey, is voting here all your friends that actually voted too. What did they find? Well, they get twice as many people who then report that they voted on Facebook spontaneously with the social proof. So you kind of get the sense of, other people are voting that must be the thing I'm supposed to do today. And it can really affect big things like elections. I mean twice the number of people voting with 61 million people. That is a lot of people. These are some PSYCHPROTIPS that we can engage in outside finding the right benchmarks and finding the right social proof. But we can also do something ourselves to kind of put ourselves on the social line. And this is the power of behaving better through public pledging. What do I mean pledging? It's kind of like pledge allegiance to the flag. But it's really you solemnly swear that you're going to do something and you say it publicly. So your social reputation is kind of on the line if you don't do it. And there's lots of evidence that just the simple active doing this can change around our behavior and maybe even make our behavior a little bit more moral. One study by Meeker and colleagues looked at this in doctors, there's this problem in doctors where doctors have a temptation to give out more antibiotics than they're supposed to. People ask for them. Doctors sometimes get kickbacks and stuff. There's this temptation to do it more than they're supposed to, but doctors know it's kind of not the moral thing to do. So could we use the power of a public pledge to get doctors not to do this? And so the public pledge was that doctors were asked to put up a poster in their office where they sign it and they say, I'm going to be really careful and not over prescribe these antibiotics. Versus a control condition where there's no poster doctors are just reminded about what they're supposed to do with standard practice. What do these researchers find? Well, if you look at the change in the percentage of antibiotics that doctors are doing the control actually boosted the number of doctors' prescriptions, right? It's kind of, yeah, I'm not going to do it. But then there's no public pledging then they actually do it even more. But in the public pledge condition now, all of a sudden these doctors are doing it less. So the active public pledging means you stick to behaviors that you want to stick to because your social status is kind of on the line. These are all ways that we can use the social situation to promote our happiness goals. Yes, our social situation sometimes brings us down, but it's a powerful mechanism to do the right thing for ourselves. [MUSIC]
